Posts Tagged ‘catastrophic injuries’

Ruling affects unintentional injury claims

The Wisconsin SupremeCourt ruled that a cheerleader who was dropped by her male teammate can’t sue him under state law. Wisconsin has a state law the prevents participants in contact sports from suing other potentially negligent participants for unintentional injuries.

NCAA studies on catastrophic injuries support the proposition that cheerleading is the leading source of catastrophic injuries including death, paralysis, and other disabilities. The most common cause of such injuries is contact with floor and contact with another participant.

Amateur baseball rates are low

All sports entail some element of risk of catastrophic injury. However, the frequency of such catastrophic injuries is surprisingly low in amateur baseball.To summarize, the overall rate of catastrophic injuries such as deaths and disabilities is only one per one million participants.

“The final report includes eighteen years of data collection from 1989 through 2006. Participation numbers for that period of time included 82,687,876 amateur baseball players in 13 organizations. Catastrophic injuries for that same period of time included 39 fatalities, 26 disability injuries, and 30 injuries with complete recovery. The catastrophic injury rate for the eighteen years is 0.11 injuries per 100,000 participants or approximately one injury per 1,000,000 participants. This figure is very low. The eighteen year injury rate for fatalities was 0.05 per 100,000 participants, 0.03 for disability injuries, and 0.04 for serious or recovery injuries.”